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All of the latest Mists of Pandaria newsThe Daily Quest: Dungeon finder tips and tricks
by Elizabeth Harper 
Mar 10th 2010 at 11:00PM
Because of dungeon finder, we're all PUGging a lot more these days -- for better and for worse. Let's just say that if today's TDQ covered horrible tales from the dungeon finder, it would be ten times as long, at the very least. But fortunately for all of us, WoW-bloggers around the world have some great advice to offer on how to improve your PUG experience.
- Panzercow discusses heroic PUG tanking.
- Too Many Annas walks you through how to be successful in a PUG.
- Can Tank, Will Travel talks about tanking irritants (many of which seem PUG-related).
- World of Warcraft Philosophized offers advice for dungeon speed runs and wonders if the dungeon finder should put people of similar gear levels together.
- And -- a bit older than the rest of the posts here, but still worth reading if you're interested in the topic -- our very first guest post covered tips for DPS running heroics.
Filed under: The Daily Quest
Reader Comments (Page 2 of 3)
WB Mar 11th 2010 8:24AM
Gonna have to try this tonight.
I'm trying to gear up my healer and the random system keeps dropping me into FoS and PoS. While I'm geared for a run involving CCs and slow pulls I just can't keep up with the 'speed run' tanks who pull large chunks of the dungeon at once.
Marcosius Mar 11th 2010 9:20AM
Hollow Leviathan:
It looks in to your bags, but not your bank I think. Well, if it does that would explain helluvalot on why i'm blocked out of HoR with nearly full complement 213+ ilevel gear on (rings and trinkets 174-200 because those things NEVER F****G DROP) because as a roleplayer I have plenty of low-itemlevel gear in my bank as props.
Lucidien Mar 11th 2010 12:47AM
In these cases (which I see all the time), my guess is that your DPS(s) and sometimes a healer, have been sitting in a queue for 5-20 minutes (usually 10min at 80 on pure DPS on my server), and have, in that time:
a) Alt-Tabbed to Facebbok
b) Went afk to make coffee/food/love
c) Went afk to attend to spousal (or parental) aggro
d) Went afk to attend to crying child
e) Went afk to do homework (hah!)
f) Alt+Tabbed to play a different game
g) Alt+Tabbed to troll the Blizzard Forums, WoW.com or MMO-Champion
i) Is busy having a /dance off in Goldshire or Brill.
Either way, these people are idiots, and I can say that because my main is a Mage who geared to a 5300+ Gearscore purely through the RDF tool and never missed a port-in. Why? Because I won't queue if I'm going to get up, and I'll de-queue if I have to get the door or something, also, when I do alt-tab, I keep the WoW sound set to play in the background so I hear the whopping great fanfare when the group forms.
The sad thing is that we never know the names of these afk-ers, so we can't report their careless wasting of our collective time. I've wanted to rant about this. For a long time.
Lucidien Mar 11th 2010 1:03AM
Intended to be a reply to Rai above. WTB Editz
catriona Mar 11th 2010 2:25AM
People are 'idiots' because they go to tend to a crying child?
Okaaay...
AlmtyBob Mar 11th 2010 3:34AM
So obviously you weren't queue'd when you troll'd wow.com today. People aren't idiots because they don't want to stare at their screen for 20 minutes waiting for their spot. There's only so much UI tweaking/Auctioning/Daily Questing you can do before you need to go take a dump and grab a snack. Sorry someone wastes a minute of your life once in a while.
Sleutel Mar 11th 2010 8:22AM
"The sad thing is that we never know the names of these afk-ers, so we can't report their careless wasting of our collective time."
You stay at the top of the queue if someone else declines. It usually doesn't take that long to put another group together. Maybe if you'd AFK to make love, you wouldn't be so tense.
(cutaia) Mar 11th 2010 4:09PM
Some people just like to sign on sometimes and do one random heroic for their daily frost badges. They might not have anything else they'd like to do in the game at the moment and would feel more productive doing something around the house while keeping one eye on the screen.
It sounds as though you'd prefer they "waste" 20 minutes of their own time staring at the screen instead of vacuuming their house or something because of the risk that they might "waste" 15 seconds of your time as you get put back at the top of the list. Kind of selfish, eh?
Ryan Mar 11th 2010 1:50AM
Here's my Dungeon Finder tip:
You cannot run a dungeon on your newish char (ie. "Level 70 just landed in Northrend, still got that Lich King problem?"), as you do on your [Epic] geared main. Pulling trash before the healer has rezzed the DPS who insisted on standing in a puddle of hurt is NOT going to end well.
analogkid Mar 11th 2010 2:06AM
I found occasionally I'll get paired with a vocal healer when tanking, telling me how much I should pull, or if we should do a full clear or not, etc. These people think they have the upper hand, well guess what, it's a lot easier to find a new healer, than it is a new tank. DPS tend to be quiet since they know they have no leverage in the situation, nor do they want to wait 10 to 20 minutes to queue for a new instance.
I always try and do a full clear (even long instances like BRD) since the DPS usually wait the longest and a lot of people these days are in it for the XP, so why screw them out of it.
psychodude Mar 11th 2010 3:17AM
Oh stop being so full of yourself. Sure you're a tank and tanks are needed, but so are healers and DPS. All aspects of the holy trinity play a vital role.
And a healer saying you can pull more? Well perhaps he's just capable of healing more pulls, and if DPS works effectively along with that too you'll do the run faster. Or if he's indicating you should pull less, then stop trying to show off and realize the healer isn't experienced enough or you're just acting as a suicidal maniac where the healer is just trying to prevent a whipe.
Either play as a team, or follow lead of the person who choice to be dungeon leader; regardless of their class. All classes are needed anyway, the elitism attitude however is not.
AlmtyBob Mar 11th 2010 3:45AM
You give us tanks a bad name. It's nice that you like to do full clears, I do to, but the shield icon doesn't grant you power over everyone. You ARE easily replaceable as a tankless group in progress will get a high spot in the queue for a new tank. When I'm tanking I vastly prefer full clears and speed runs but if 2 or 3 of the others would rather skip/slow down I do it.
I also really hate the prevailing attitude that since you probably won't see these people again you can be a jerk without any repercussions. To paraphrase an old quote, "the true judge of character is how you run with people you won't queue with again."
analogkid Mar 11th 2010 10:30AM
I never claimed being a tank gives me some powers over everyone.
Usually healers are telling me I should pull a lot more, except in my experience doing so usually leaves me dead since those same healers can't keep up with damage. Sometimes they've even gone so far as to pull themselves usually pointless pulls that could have been skipped.
Perhaps I've should have clarified by I'm talk about the 5% of the bad runs I've had with people. 95% of them are smooth. It's those small percentage of people that bother me. I'm not an elitist that posts recount after every pull.
(cutaia) Mar 11th 2010 3:35PM
I agree with him to an extent because of the way most people come off when saying these things.
Now, if someone says something friendly along the lines of, "Feel free to pull as much as you want. I can handle healing it." Alright, then. Let's do this, friend!
BUT: When someone just starts going, "hurry up gogogo," and/or pulling mobs expecting me to rush over and taunt them off, or taking boss-skipping shortcuts without even asking if the rest of the group might want to do them...well, I don't take kindly to that. Politeness goes both ways, and if someone three pulls in wants to whine that I'm not going fast enough for them like a toddler trying to get to the next ride at Disneyland, they're going on my ignore list so I don't have to hear it.
I've got a word for the people who do this crap: Tailgaters. Just like on the highway, they love to rudely get on your ass and think that doing so is somehow going to rush you into conforming to their wishes so they can save a couple seconds of time here and there. Just like on the highway, though, this behavior is probably more likely to make you tap the breaks every now and then instead.
DarthPeePee Mar 11th 2010 5:13AM
You know what grinds my gears? "HEAL ME!" L2 bandaid you baddies
DarthPeePee Mar 11th 2010 5:19AM
I was referring to those (DPS) who depend on heals all the damn time. Loldks perhaps?
Yitzak Mar 11th 2010 7:07AM
I'm smellin' trollage. Yup, stinks pretty bad too - nothing worse than trolling done artlessly, imo.
Thyago Mar 11th 2010 8:40AM
I believe that every dungeon is "runnable" by 80's, given that they have at least blues and one or two purples. It all falls on the way you play, and sincerily, most people dont want to change their gameplay to adjust to a lower-geared healer, for example.
I say this cuz Im a new healer. 2K GS (hate GS, but what can I do...), but still people won't run some heroics with me. We wiped like two times on FoS, because people don't want to stop DPSing on Mirroring Souls. Another example would be the known "heal-thru" on Loken. People don't want to go back and forth, they expect every healer to be able to heal through the waves.
This is just wrong, IMO.
Hallo Mar 11th 2010 9:51AM
This is a really good post. You're running these instances in the gear they were intended to be run in.
I think most people forgot how to properly do the Loken encounter.
And the trash pulls on FoS are my least favorite thing to tank in the entire game, I don't know why.
Eg Mar 11th 2010 1:35PM
@ Hallo,
I hate those trash pulls as well with my warrior tank... largely because the "rings" of casters require a bit longer to gain decent threat on the mob. It seems no matter how many times I get that heroic, there's most likely someone who isn't going to give me three or four extra seconds.
@Thyago,
Good points... but don't give up. If there's one thing to be said about starting into heroics, its that you must take lots of abuse as healer or tank, but it takes no time until you're OVERGEARING it. Ignore the people giving you a hard time, and keep at it. You're probably already in t9 since I began posting this.